Dr Pepper makes rounds in “Mad Men” hospital scene
From The New York Times
By Stuart Elliott
Published: September 24, 2009
Via AAF SmartBrief
The AMC TV series “Mad Men” is becoming known for the care its makers take to insure that everything viewers see reflects the period in which the show is set. This season, it’s 1963, and in the episode that was shown on Sunday, it was early July when two mainstay characters, the adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and the now-former office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) found themselves in a waiting room in a hospital sharing Dr Peppers from a vending machine.
The brand’s presence in the scene took one viewer who grew up in New York City by surprise. Sure, the verisimilitude was perfect: the machine vended bottles of Dr Pepper, not cans (for 10 cents each!).
And the period ad slogan of Dr Pepper was prominent: “10, 2, 4,” conveying that Dr Pepper was good to drink at 10, 2 or 4 or any other time of the day or night.
No, the viewer was surprised because he has a hard time remembering seeing much of Dr Pepper in the New York of the 1960s. It was not until years later that Dr Pepper found widespread distribution in the city after the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York agreed to sell it. Before then, he recalls, it could be found in candy stores and groceries here and there — but vending machines were not exactly commonplace.
And if the hospital Joan and Don were visiting was in Manhattan, where the make-believe ad agency Sterling Cooper is located, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola vending machines far outnumbered the Dr Pepper machines in July 1963.
(Not to give away too much of the plot of the episode, but it would seem for certain reasons that the hospital had to be as close to the Sterling Cooper office as possible.)
So what’s the deal? It turns out that Dr Pepper’s role in the scene was part reality, part branded entertainment.
According to Greg Artkop, a spokesman for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which now owns Dr Pepper, the request for the vending machine “came from set decoration” on behalf of the “Mad Men” production team and “we put them in touch with the Dr Pepper Museum for bottles and the appropriate imagery.”
Another brand sold by Dr Pepper Snapple is Canada Dry, which has a season-long partnership with “Mad Men” for the current season. The agreement includes a “custom heritage vignette” developed by AMC, Mr. Artkop said, recalling past Canada Dry advertising; it runs during episodes of the series along with regular, current commercials.
There are also slide cards onscreen before the Canada Dry spots come on, recounting facts about the brand. And Canada Dry will sponsor the season finale of “Mad Men,” Mr. Artkop said, with a 60-second version of the vignette to appear in that episode.
As for Dr Pepper’s presence in New York City in 1963, “it was distributed by independent bottlers in the area,” he added, and according to information in the archives, the top bottlers in New York included two located in the boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn.
The top bottlers in New Jersey, the archives show, were in Elizabeth and Union City, both near New York City.
So would a real-life Joan and Don have been drinking Dr Pepper in the waiting room? Again, not to give away too much of the plot, but certainly any such qualms are minor compared with what the folks who sell John Deere riding mowers must be thinking.